Islamic Akhlaq

Ibn Miskawayh wrote the Tahdhib al-Akhlaq, the Refinement of Character, in Buyid era Iran in the late tenth century, and it became the founding text of philosophical akhlaq. His method was frankly Aristotelian: virtue is a mean between two vicious extremes, courage standing between cowardice and recklessness, generosity between miserliness and extravagance, and the virtuous life is achieved through habituation under the guidance of reason rather than through obedience alone. Miskawayh presented this as a medicine for the soul, borrowing directly from the language of Galenic physicians treating the body, and he wrote for an audience of educated courtiers and officials rather than jurists or theologians.

Akhlaq did not stay confined to that philosophical register. A century later, al-Ghazali's Ihya Ulum al-Din, the Revival of the Religious Sciences, absorbed the akhlaq genre's vocabulary of character and habituation into a programme of Sufi spiritual discipline, reworking Miskawayh's virtuous mean as a stage on the path toward nearness to God rather than an end in itself. Later advice literature for rulers carried the same framework into practical statecraft, treating a just ruler's character as the precondition for a just state.

The genre's range, courtly ethics, philosophical psychology, Sufi self discipline and mirrors for princes, is why akhlaq resists translation as a single English word. It names the whole discipline of forming a person's moral character, whichever institution, the court, the philosophical school or the Sufi lodge, was doing the forming, and its sources in Aristotle sit alongside its sources in the Quran and hadith without either being treated as the sole authority.

Akhlaq runs from Miskawayh through al-Ghazali's Sufi reworking of the same vocabulary. A third major stage sits between philosophy and mysticism rather than choosing either. Nasir al-Din al-Tusi, a thirteenth century Persian astronomer and philosopher, wrote the Akhlaq-i Nasiri, the Nasirean Ethics, around 1235, and said openly that its first section was built on Miskawayh's Tahdhib al-Akhlaq, keeping the same Aristotelian doctrine of virtue as a mean between extremes and the same case for habituation under reason's guidance.

Tusi's contribution was structural as much as philosophical. He organized practical philosophy into three connected books rather than one, ethics governing the individual soul, household management governing the family, and politics governing the city, following a tripartite division with roots in Aristotle's own scheme but rarely worked out at this length or with this much internal cross reference in earlier Islamic ethical writing. The result reads less like a philosopher's argument and more like a reference work meant to be taught.

That is largely what it became. Copied, taught and commented on across the Persianate world for centuries after Tusi's own lifetime, the Nasirean Ethics served as a standard textbook in madrasas from Iran to South Asia long after the Mongol court Tusi originally wrote parts of it for had vanished, carrying Miskawayh's philosophical akhlaq forward into classrooms neither man lived to see.